From Gutenberg to the Heidelberger press, moveable type sparked the mass production of printed books and was the first time information and ideas could be circulated on a global scale. The printing press was really our first Internet of sorts, and certainly the catalyst for typography and information and graphic design as we know it.

Metal, ink, and sweat has largely been replaced by Adobe, Apple, and hundreds of digital type houses. And that's all good and “progressy.” But what's really exciting is seeing how these classic industrial printing tools are being reused and rethought to produce amazing new artwork that bridges the gap between old and new, fine art and design, and explores the cracks in between.

Combining an underground press outlook and aesthetic with mass market distribution, US: A Paperback Magazine, was edited by Richard Goldstein and published by Bantam Books. US provided “all the news that’s fit to eat” over a three-issue run from June 1969 through May 1970.

In 1966, media theorist Marshall McLuhan, designer Quentin Fiore and producer Jerome Agel set the scene for a new publishing genre with the release of The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Utilizing collaged, cinematic combinations of text and image, Massage and the subsequent “non-book” titles produced in the following decade were made to appeal to the short attention spans of the television (or electric information) age. Though now nearly half a century old, this short-lived set of experimental books provides a set of possibilities for counteracting anxieties on the role of print in today’s media landscape of socially-networked, data-saturated prosumers.